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I don't come from the best family, and I don't have the best past. I had a wife, but she died. I had a family, but they have treated me like dumpster shit from the day I was born. I feel like I strived so hard to make them happy, and yet all I got back was being taken advantage of. I paid off my brother's student loans one day, and I don't even get a passing acknowledgement anymore of doing this. Sure it gets mentioned, but only in the sense it was done, and that's pretty much it. Same with most everyone in my extended family, no one sees me as a person, so much as a tool of their own use, which can be discarded when I'm no longer useful to them.

Recently I joined a church, a really nice church. The people are 100% white, super caring, my brain loved it at first. But now, my brain is super conflicted. I have no idea why, but my brain simply is not accustomed to people being authentically nice. Sure, I know deep down they mean well, but I almost feel like crying in the car on the way home, and I don't understand why. These people generally like being around me, but i cant help but feel like all these people secretly hate me for some reason. And yet they have no reason to hate me. They even baked me an apple pie, and yet i still think back to my mom calling me a fat fuck when i was underweight, and how eating apple pie really isn't a good idea. I know i shouldnt let it get to me, and yet i cant stop it.

One of my mom's favorite forms of punishment as a child, was to physically isolate my brother and I into these dark rooms, with no noise, for a few hours. The idea being that my mom preferred psychological torture techniques, over physical torture techniques. She would routinely humiliate us in public by saying she should have aborted us, how we always sucked as children, how we needed to bail out her pension, etc. It made use feel ashamed to be alive. And people only seem to focus on the physical punishment, but being 7 and having your mom tell you she wished you were dead does seem to do much deeper damage than being slapped on the butt.

I don't come from the best family, and I don't have the best past. I had a wife, but she died. I had a family, but they have treated me like dumpster shit from the day I was born. I feel like I strived so hard to make them happy, and yet all I got back was being taken advantage of. I paid off my brother's student loans one day, and I don't even get a passing acknowledgement anymore of doing this. Sure it gets mentioned, but only in the sense it was done, and that's pretty much it. Same with most everyone in my extended family, no one sees me as a person, so much as a tool of their own use, which can be discarded when I'm no longer useful to them. Recently I joined a church, a really nice church. The people are 100% white, super caring, my brain loved it at first. But now, my brain is super conflicted. I have no idea why, but my brain simply is not accustomed to people being authentically nice. Sure, I know deep down they mean well, but I almost feel like crying in the car on the way home, and I don't understand why. These people generally like being around me, but i cant help but feel like all these people secretly hate me for some reason. And yet they have no reason to hate me. They even baked me an apple pie, and yet i still think back to my mom calling me a fat fuck when i was underweight, and how eating apple pie really isn't a good idea. I know i shouldnt let it get to me, and yet i cant stop it. One of my mom's favorite forms of punishment as a child, was to physically isolate my brother and I into these dark rooms, with no noise, for a few hours. The idea being that my mom preferred psychological torture techniques, over physical torture techniques. She would routinely humiliate us in public by saying she should have aborted us, how we always sucked as children, how we needed to bail out her pension, etc. It made use feel ashamed to be alive. And people only seem to focus on the physical punishment, but being 7 and having your mom tell you she wished you were dead does seem to do much deeper damage than being slapped on the butt.

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[–] • 1 pt

The urge to recoil from your genuine and kind-hearted church is the result of psychological abuse you suffered at the hands of your sociopathic, narcissistic family. It's the same as a dog that's kicked every time its owner smiles will learn to recoil from smiles despite the fact that almost everyone else who smiles at a dog does so out of genuine affection and kindness. That deep-seated childhood trauma created the defense mechanism where you're suspicious of kindness because as a child the appearance of kindness was exclusively used to manipulate you, rather than being wholly genuine and good-hearted in the case of your church.

I strongly recommend continuing to attend your church and enmeshing yourself in that community. These sound like genuinely kind people, and the more you spend time with them and avoid your cancerous family the more you'll learn to adapt your emotions and behavior to living a happier and psychologically healthier life. Once you develop close friendships within that church community I would encourage you to speak about your childhood with those close friends. They're good people. Some of them will "get it" and be able to provide guidance and support on how to recover from being the victim of child abuse. Those who don't "get it" because they've been sheltered from this type of toxic behavior will still be able to provide kindness and a sanity check on what type of behavior is acceptable and what type needs to be dropkicked out of your life with extreme prejudice. You likely have a great deal of hesitation there because showing vulnerability was straight up dangerous as a child (speaking from experience here...), but a good church group is going to want to give you the biggest damn hug in the world and invite you over for xmas and Thanksgiving so you have good people to spend the holidays with.

Regarding the physical vs psychological abuse, being more upset by the psychological trauma is completely normal. I know I would have preferred more physical abuse and less psychological, because bruises are a heck of a lot harder to rationalize as "acceptable" and a whole lot easier to use as evidence to get abusive parents thrown in jail.